Eta

Its story

Eta Pavonis shines in the tail of the southern Peacock with a warm, amber light: an orange K1 giant swollen to about 33 solar radii and radiating more than six hundred times the Sun's energy. At 352 light-years, its 4,640 K surface tells the fate that also awaits the Sun —the stage when stars puff up their atmosphere wider than their own inner planets— and, unhurried, drifts closer to us.